Euan Macdonald

Euan Macdonald isolates ideas, making them manifest with simple gestures and through simplifying the visual field. For You are My Nebula, his solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Macdonald will present a 16mm film loop of a nebula captured through the telescope at the Southern Cross Observatory in Tasmania. Unlike the human eye, which cannot translate colour at such distances, film and video cameras can read the multiple colours particular to nebulae. Yet Macdonald still chooses to forgo the awesome spectrum of colour, portraying the cluster of stars in black and white. He removes information not just to represent how the human eye sees, but to draw attention to the means of representation in order to create a lull between spectacle and sublime understanding.

Biography

Euan Macdonald was born in Edinburgh in 1965 and moved to Edmonton with his family as an adolescent. He studied at various art schools including the Alberta College of Art, Calgary the Ontario College of Art, Toronto. He has been exhibiting his work for the past twelve years in various group shows internationally including Gimme Shelter, Videos on Urban Discomfort, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City and Fresh, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. He has also had solo shows in San Francisco, Munich, Rome, Sydney, Vancouver, Los Angeles, and Tokyo. In 2004, Macdonald installed an outdoor sculpture entitled The Tower — a full scale replica of the top 25 feet of the CN Tower in the Toronto Sculpture Garden. He is currently based in Los Angeles.